


Two Rules

by fourfreedoms



Series: Action Reaction [1]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Blow Jobs, First Time Bottoming, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Hand Jobs, Hatesex, M/M, Topping from the Bottom, all the feelings, but oh my god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 17:19:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/942536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Uh... love/hate, I guess (laughs), no, I’m just kidding, I mean we definitely get along off the ice."</i> - Jonathan Toews</p><p>Johnny wasn't just kidding. A story where Johnny and Patrick definitely <b>don't get along off the ice.</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Rules

**Author's Note:**

> Rosekay and Countess Von Boobs get a million thanks for audiencing this nonsense, especially when I had a stress-rant about it at work to rosekay, and then made Countess Von Boobs read every single word I added before I would consent to add any more. Y'all are the greatest, and also evil for continuing to bamboozle me into writing you more porn. 
> 
> THIS FIC WAS HARD, YO. I don't even know why, and at the end it turned to shameless fluff. SOMEDAY, there will be an actual hatesex fic in this fandom.

When rookies arrive, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, it doesn’t matter if it’s straight from the OHL or NCAA, or even after a spell with the IceHogs, they all come in expecting the storied friendship of Kane and Toews. But they learn two things very fast: 

Rule 1. Don’t Talk About How Mom and Dad Hate Each Other. 

Rule 2. No really. They hate each other. 

It’s kind of sad to watch the light go out in their eyes the first time Kaner and Tazer have a loud screaming match in the locker room that probably involves the throwing of helmets and the hurling of expletives and inevitably the get-the-fuck-away-from-mes. Give ‘em a few months and they’ll learn to laugh, because Johnny and Patrick are magic on ice, the whole world thinks they make daisy chains and hold hands, and when the cameras are off they treat each other like poison. 

“Shut the fuck up, you megalomaniacal dicksuck, I know what the fuck I’m talking about,” Pat shouts, after hurling a waterbottle so hard at the wall that the top bursts off, ice flying in a million directions. 

“I can’t hear anything past my shock that you used that word in a sentence,” Johnny replies, voice deadly flat. “Correctly, even.” 

“You trying to say something, you fucking punk ass wannabe college boy,” Kaner says, turning back around like he’s going to fly at Johnny. 

Johnny snorts unconcerned, already turning away, and maybe that’s what does it. That’s the moment that Kaner loses it. The casual nonchalance where Tazer just dismisses him altogether. 

The punch never lands. Oduya transposes himself in between Kaner and Johnny, and Hammer appears at Kaner’s other side, dragging his raised arm down and leading him off to the showers to calm down. It’s not the first hit that somebody on the Blackhawks has intercepted for those two. It won’t be the last. It’s frustrating as hell on the days it stops being so funny, but they put up with it because Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews may want to kill each other, but they’ve won the ‘Hawks two Stanley cups and don’t look liable to stop. 

Only Seabrook notices that Johnny’s hands are shaking from where he’s collapsed in front of his stall to unlace his skates. This is just the way these things go. 

*

Johnny honestly doesn’t know how he roomed with Kaner for nearly five whole years. Well, he does. The organization had made it very clear that they were to present a strong unified front as the two faces of the franchise, and as much as Johnny would like to malign Patrick, the both of them are nothing if not professional and devoted when it comes to hockey—when it comes to the Blackhawks. But he’s still not entirely certain how he survived the unmitigated hell of the whole thing. When the terms of the CBA changed, it was like a thousand weights were lifted from his shoulders and he could finally hurl water bottles wherever the hell he wanted and sleep in to the very last minute without Kaner’s fucking Katy Perry “Wide Awake” alarm blaring at him at 400 decibels. 

He also doesn’t feel half so crazy and spun out, constantly at the edge of his sanity, just waiting for Kaner to push him over. Now it’s only about 30% of his waking hours that are spent at terrifying levels of rage. He’s probably going to have a heart attack or pop an embolism by the age of 40, but by then his hockey career will probably be mostly over, so they’re tabling that issue. You’d think, having spent a fifth of his life playing with Kaner that he’d have some perspective on their shared loathing, how it is that Kaner manages so consistently to dial him past eleven, but Johnny’s got nothing. Not clarity, not strategy, nothing. At this point, he’s come to realize the fact that they hate each other is not getting in the way, so why bother trying to talk around it or through it. It simply is what it is. 

They fight in practice, and on the bench, and in the locker rooms, on the plane when the others were fool enough to let them sit anywhere near each other, not when the mics are on, and not when the reporters are present, although sometimes the barbs are unstoppable. It’s hockey though, so Kaner threatening to beat him up to the press just sounds charming, rather than the entirely serious threat it is. And you know, that’s fine. He’d like to spend less time with a hand grip, but this is how it is. 

Sometimes though, the fight lasts off the ice, it lasts past the win, past team dinner, and past celebratory beers, and by then it starts fucking shit up. People are used to them wanting to kill each other, but Johnny and Kaner, independently, are both pretty friendly people, albeit Johnny is aware of the fact that he’s far more reserved than Kaner. Sometimes though, the fight just wrecks Johnny and he feels miserable and out-of-control and he wants to take something, anything, doxepin, thorazine, he doesn’t know, just anything not to be able to feel this way any longer. 

Tonight is one of those nights. 

And so after watching Kaner roll his eyes after every single word out of Johnny’s mouth, he just gives up, throws his napkin on the table, and goes back to his thankfully empty room. 

It’s been happening more often recently—the really heavy arguments that say more than what’s been actually shouted—now that they’ve won their second cup and the season is off to a slow start. He’s not sure what Kaner was expecting. It’s been fifteen years since a team won back-to-back Stanley cups, but it’s like Kaner still expects them to turn this one out. For Johnny to turn this one out. It isn’t miserable, but they’ve definitely been treading water, and Johnny’s got no clue how to get them back on their feet. 

The last thing he expects is for Kaner to show up at his hotel room at 1 am by himself armed with a six pack. 

“Can I come in?” he asks. 

Johnny doesn’t even reply, he just snorts and steps back from the door. Kaner makes a face at him and then visibly pauses to take a breath. 

“Sharpy said I should apologize,” Kaner tells him, although his tone of voice says exactly what he thinks about that. 

“You listened?” Johnny says, settling on the edge of his bed. They always book him a king size bed now that he’s alone. He’s not used to it yet. Even his bed at home is a queen. Funny to be nostalgic for a part of his life that includes more of Kaner. “ _You_?” 

“He said you weren’t going to,” Kaner replies, arms crossed, six pack abandoned on top of the little glass-top desk. 

Johnny can’t help the ugly noise that makes it out of his throat. “What exactly am I apologizing for?” 

Kaner stares at him, lips parted, eyes darkened with such disdain and animosity it makes Johnny breathless. “Are. You. Actually. That. Fucking. Dumb?” Kaner says, biting off artificial pauses between the words. 

Johnny tightens his lips, left eyebrow arching upwards in a look that he knows actually drives Kaner crazy. 

He sees Kaner’s left fist clench. 

“You gonna hit me, Pat?” he asks, lifting his chin. 

Patrick doesn’t say anything, just stares him down. People can chirp the hell out of him for his size, but Patrick is still perfectly capable of being intimidating when he wants. Those ice blue eyes leveled in frank and utter determined rage—if Johnny wasn’t so fucking used to it by now, might actually make him take a step back. 

“Do it, then, fucking hit me,” Johnny goads him, voice soft. Patrick holds his gaze and Johnny rolls to his feet, upping the ante, because this is the only way they know how to interact. 

Patrick remains motionless, but his eyes track Johnny’s movement and it’s the only sign that he’s even paying attention. 

“Come on,” Johnny says, turning his head, offering him his chin, the scarred side, “do it, if it will make you feel better.” 

When Patrick finally moves, Johnny honestly expects to be punched, he does not expect Kaner’s hand fisted in his shirtfront, turning and spinning him into the wall next to the closet. He doesn’t expect the deeply fierce kiss following hard on the heels of his head hitting the plasterboard, mouth parting on a shocked gasp of pain. Kaner presses him back to the wall, muscling him in place like Johnny doesn’t have over thirty pounds on him. 

He gives no quarter, as if Johnny won’t fucking gut punch him and kick his ridiculous ass out of his room. Johnny flashes on the idea like a series of slides, but by then Kaner has pushed in even closer and bitten his fucking lip. 

Oh god. 

Johnny kisses him back, fisting his hands in the hem of Kaner’s shirt, drawing the fabric so tight he feels it strain against his fingertips. Kaner arches against him, grinding their hips together in a way that hurts more than it feels good. Johnny doesn’t stop him. 

“I fucking—cannot stand—” Kaner pants into his ear, hands tightening dangerously on Johnny’s upper arms. He shifts and twists against Kaner, trying to push the thick ridge of his hardon into the meat of Kaner’s thigh. 

“You fucking want something?” Kaner mocks, pulling back, widening the distance between their hips. His lips are tender and pink, cheeks lit up in a hard flush. Johnny’s hands are still wrapped tight in the fabric of his shirt and it creaks in his grip, the neck stretching so that Patrick’s collarbone is bared. He lets go, but the rents he left in Patrick’s shirt persist. 

“Not more than you do,” Johnny bites back, eyeing the swollen distended outline in Kaner’s pants. He shakes his head, scrubbing a hand over his face, and meets Patrick’s eyes. “Sick bitch.”

Kaner makes a sound like Johnny’s tagged him just under the ribs. “You’re nothing without me,” he says, voice dropping into a whisper that Johnny hears as loud as a shout. 

Johnny hauls him back in by the neckline of the shirt, watching as the collar bites into the tender skin of Patrick’s throat. “I fucking know that, you cunt,” Johnny replies. He has honestly never used that word in his life, but Patrick brings out the worst in him. 

Patrick laughs, in self-deprecation or scorn, Johnny can’t tell, but he doesn’t care because Patrick is kissing him again, shoving him back against the wall a second time. This time Johnny has the good sense to brace himself so that his head doesn’t snap back. 

Patrick curses him out when Johnny pulls his jeans open and gets his hands on his cock. He’s big, bigger than Johnny would’ve expected from the few cursory glances he’s caught in the showers, guess it makes sense with him being so comfortable being a little dude in hockey. 

It’s difficult at this angle, Patrick trying to push him bodily through the wall, barely letting up with the pitiless biting kisses. Finally Johnny wrenches away, shoving Patrick back when he moves to slam Johnny back into the wall again. 

“Stop it,” Johnny says, flicking his nipple hard enough to make Kaner wince. Kaner’s jeans are hanging open at his waist, the black band of his boxers shoved down, the head of his cock peeking out over the top. He still looks furious, like he wants to murder Johnny and leave the pieces all over the hotel. Johnny’s hit with a fierce wave of wanting that has no logic or explanation. 

Kaner meets his eyes, snapping the band of his boxers down with his thumb and drawing his dick free. He bites his lip, eyes hard on Johnny’s face as he starts drawing himself off, measured and deliberate. A challenge somehow. Yeah, Patrick Kane knows exactly how big his dick is. 

And Johnny knows exactly what he’s thinking. He’s said it often enough, all acid and anger on the bench. 

“You think I’m going to my knees for you?” Johnny asks lightly. 

Patrick shakes his head, looking past him, through him, as if Johnny’s not really there. “You don’t have it in you.” 

Johnny nearly socks him in the throat. 

Johnny reaches for him and Kaner catches his wrist, hand tightening to the point of pain, thumb digging into his pulse as he twists Johnny’s hand at an unnatural angle, hand flexing helplessly into a fist as Kaner’s grip grinds the fragile bones in his wrist together. 

The strain on his right wrist reaches dangerous levels, hand turned almost 90 degrees from where it should be. Kaner’s grip tightens further and Johnny involuntarily makes a high noise of warning, and that’s when Kaner’s hold eases. He tugs Johnny in by the abused wrist, and the skin pulses hotly, full of sensation in the loose circle of Kaner’s fingers. 

They crash together, falling toward the bed and then missing it entirely so that they land in the tight space between it and the wall, Johnny at the bottom. All the air in his lungs gets punched out of him and he gasps wetly against Kaner’s throat. Kaner wrenches Johnny’s pants open, scratching him viciously just below his belly-button by accident, making him arch and moan. It’s pain through and through, nothing sexy about it, and yet he’s still achingly hard in Kaner’s too-tight grip. 

Johnny has to fumble between their bodies to get his hand back on Kaner’s cock. Kaner’s circumsized, just like Johnny, he probably needs something, a wet palm, lube, Johnny being a little bit more delicate with him—but he doesn’t knock Johnny hand away nor does he stop pulling Johnny off. 

The arousal is almost uncomfortable in his gut, urgent and desperate, the same feeling he gets when the clock is running down and he knows they’re going to lose and throwing everything he has into it just isn’t enough to even up the score. Kaner moans when Johnny tugs on his balls, reflexively speeding up his hand and thrusting into Johnny’s grip harder at the same time. 

Their jeans are chafing together, the tops of his thighs will be red and sensitive tomorrow, and it’s hard to tell what feels good from the million little annoyances chipping away at his consciousness. He thinks of Kaner, of what this must look like to somebody who could be watching them, what this might look like if they were doing it right, on a bed, with all the care and consideration people should have for sex and the urgent feeling inside him condenses further. 

He comes like that, lying on the floor, between the wall and the bed, with a barked elbow and welt developing low on his belly, barely able to get enough air. Kaner laughs, triumphant, and then collapses on him, now that he doesn’t have to give his own arm space to move. 

“Fuck,” he says, eyelashes fluttering against Johnny’s collarbone as Johnny keeps working his wrist. “Fuck.”

He doesn’t last much longer. Johnny knows because he’s watching the stupid alarm clock that sits on top of the television, but it stretches forever, and Johnny feels every breath Kaner humidly exhales against his throat, every shift in his weight above him, every muscle straining and clenching against him as Kaner lets go and comes all over Johnny’s abdomen. It stings. Kaner’s ragged nail must have opened up the skin when it caught on his stomach. Johnny’s not sure why that makes his spent dick twitch. 

“Get. Off,” he says, shoving at Patrick’s shoulder, before dumping him bodily to the floor and scrambling to his feet. He catches sight of himself in the round mirror hanging over the desk and doesn’t recognize the person with the abraded cheeks and mouth and shadowed eyes as himself. 

“You need to leave,” he tells his reflection, not even bothering to watch Patrick climb gingerly to his feet, tucking his softened cock back into his jeans. 

Patrick looks like he’s going to say something. That familiar smirk is forming at the corner of his mouth, but Johnny doesn’t stay to find out. He goes to the bathroom, turns the taps too high in the shower and climbs inside. 

*

Johnny wakes up staring at the exact spot on the wall Kaner had him hitched up against. He lies in bed for two whole minutes just glaring at it before giving up and pulling himself out from under the covers. 

Kaner seems settled on the bus to the airport and he remains silent, face shoved into a well-thumbed copy of _Ender’s Game_ on the plane. 

The détente last’s over the next few days. It’s almost like Kaner isn’t there. Except for the part where he’s bringing his A game. He’s not giving Johnny any shit at practice. His passes are clean and precise and he isn’t selfish with the puck. Johnny feels like something happened that he missed. Only the yellowing bruises and the thin scabbing line slashing across his pelvic muscles tell him that Kaner came to his room at all. 

The celebration—Kaner skating at him fullstop for a hug, relying on Johnny to put on the brakes—when Kaner scores against the Blues is real. They are always real. Johnny is happy. When they’re on the ice, all that matters is that nobody plays hockey as good and as fast and as improbably strong as Kaner. This is a sense they share. If the fairytale friendship the Blackhawks spun out of their success were ever to crumble, at least Johnny knows they would always have this time where the personalities and the baggage they carry and the fact that they can’t fucking stand each other really ceases to matter. 

All bets are off on the bench, and yet Johnny never sits beside anyone else, because on the bench, the abuse that Kaner dishes is useful. Off it, he’s never met anybody so perfectly able to tear him apart. It’s unfair to pretend like he doesn’t dish it back. 

“It’s like you two skipped the marriage and jumped straight into divorce,” Bicks tells him, after his first shouting match with Kaner on the bus since the incident in the hotel room. 

Johnny scrubs at his face and slumps into the aisle seat by Seabs, who’s already got his headphones on and an issue of Sports Illustrated open in his hands. Seabs won’t try and talk to Johnny about why Kaner’s acting like a little bitch today and Johnny really, really needs that. Kaner knocks his shoulder with his bag when he pushes by to the back of the bus. 

This behavior continues for three more days. And this time it’s Johnny who fucking breaks. 

“I’m not apologizing,” he says, when he shows up at Kaner’s door with a six pack. He wonders if they fail to drink it, is he supposed to leave with it again, the way Kaner did? 

Kaner looks exhausted, but his words have no less bite to them. “How the hell did you get past security?”

Johnny raises a brow at him. He’s got no time for this. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Kaner looks like he’s considering slamming the door in Johnny’s face, so Johnny shoves the beer at him and pushes inside. The lights are on low and some indie hipster shoe-gaze music is on, like he was trying to unwind. The apartment looks no more lived in than Johnny’s own fucking showplace, but for some reason the furniture catalogue set-up and the sectional that they somehow both own, pisses him off. 

Kaner sets the beer down on the hallway table with a thud. “Microbrew snob,” he says, with something approaching fondness and Johnny doesn’t know what to make of that. 

“You can’t act like this,” Johnny says aloud, standing in the middle of Kaner’s living room, staring out the windows at the river. 

“Like what?” he says, hands shoved deep in his pockets, like they haven’t been having this same fight for half a decade. 

And Johnny’s not firing on all cylinders, he’s exhausted and feeling fairly persecuted by this whole thing. He doesn’t understand Patrick Kane, he doesn’t even understand the people who do, and he just wants everything not to be so fucking difficult. He wishes that the same sense that tells him exactly where to be on the ice when Patrick’s sending this puck his way, would clue him in to what Patrick’s going to do next. 

He reads a call, thinking even as he moves in, that it’s the wrong one, but as his mouth meets Patrick’s and Patrick kisses him back, he realizes he actually got it right. It might be the first time in his life. 

It’s dirty and slow, and they actually manage to get their clothes off this time, stumbling into Kaner’s darkened bedroom. He’s still mad. When he pins Kaner’s wrists to the bed, he says, “Don’t you fucking move.” 

“Or what?” Kaner says, smiling up at him, hands tightening into fists like he’s getting ready to resist. 

The smile is so unexpected and so unlikely in that it’s aimed at him that Johnny is a little slow in answering. He tightens his grip before letting go to see if Kaner really will listen. He says, “I will get up and walk out of here.” 

Kaner’s eyes drop shut and his head tips back on his neck, but his hands remain where they’re crossed above his head. Johnny wants to fuck him, wants to fuck his mouth, wants to make Patrick choke on it, see the tears that spring up from being denied air, but mostly, and Johnny’s self-aware enough to realize how fucking messed up it is, he wants that smile. He wants it to be real and he wants it to not be about the fact that Johnny can take two legal hits over their own blue-line, get up and across the ice, and still set Patrick up with an assist.

They rub off in the bed, Patrick’s greasy Cetaphil from his completely obvious masturbation station smeared between them. It takes a while, chasing the edge of gratification until it’s built up so much between them, Johnny’s afraid his heart actually cannot support it. Patrick comes first, arms trembling from where he’s straining so hard to hold them in place, like it’s killing him not to touch Johnny back. Johnny groans, hands running up Patrick’s arms to press them down into the sheets. 

He doesn’t come until he moves Patrick’s leg so that it’s hooked back towards his chest so that Johnny can ride the crease of his ass, but when it happens, he’s stupidly gasping Patrick’s name, cursing him for being so difficult, and Patrick just laughs, breathless though it is. 

He hovers a moment, forehead resting on Patrick’s shoulder, before rolling carefully off of him. The stupid indie music still plays in the other room; the same four songs have been on loop the whole time—a soundtrack to this foolishness. 

“Do you want a beer?” Patrick asks, getting to his feet and obnoxiously cracking his back. He wipes his stomach off with his discarded t-shirt and Johnny doesn’t know how he can be so repulsed by the action, and yet so certain he could go again, given enough time. 

“Thought you didn’t like my microbrew choices?” he says, feeling strangely petulant. 

Patrick snorts and leaves the room. Johnny rolls his eyes and pushes his cheek further into Patrick’s pillow—it’s soft, flannel or jersey, and smells strongly of the same detergent Johnny uses himself. In a moment, he’ll get up. He’s not sleepy, but it’s comfortable here, right in the best spot in the bed that feels like it was made to cradle his body. He wonders why it is that he can never find the comfy spot when he actually wants to sleep.

Johnny wakes up with his nose pressed to Kaner’s neck, weak morning light filtering through the blinds. At some point in the night, he’d edged Kaner nearly off the mattress and now he’s sealed to his back, an arm thrown over his hip. 

What. 

The. 

Fuck. 

He jerks away and then curses under his breath when Kaner shifts, dropping into the depression that Johnny vacated with a sigh. He pauses a moment, frozen, making sure that Kaner isn’t going to jolt awake, before carefully easing himself out from the covers that Kaner must’ve pulled up over them both. 

It takes him a while to track down all of his clothing. Eventually he gives up on his socks. He can’t believe Kaner didn’t wake him up and kick his ass out, nor can he believe that he slept so soundly, he didn’t even notice he was wrapped around Kaner, morning wood flush with his ass. 

Johnny hesitates at Kaner’s door. It won’t lock behind him and he doesn’t want to leave Kaner lying in that bed, vulnerable. It’s stupid, he knows this, but he feels a little bit like he’s leaving his wallet behind on the pavement and walking away from it. He doesn’t even know why he cares—what’s going to happen to Kaner in Trump Tower? Kaner won’t appreciate the sentiment, he knows this, and eventually it’s what makes him take his hand off the doorknob and turn for the elevators. 

*

They destroy the ‘Yotes three days later in a 7-0 route on the road. Johnny almost wants to tell the guys to stop scoring, because Phoenix looks ready to lay down and die already, but ultimately, he’s not that big of a person. 

At the final whistle, with Phoenix fans pouring out of Jobing.com Arena, he meets Kaner’s eye as he skates in a loose lap over the ice. Kaner grins at him, wild and free, and Johnny smiles back, unable to help himself. 

The tentative truce lasts three weeks. Three whole weeks before Kaner gets pissed off at him while Johnny’s mic’d up at practice for some BHTV promotional thing. Johnny should just skate away, but instead he’s ripping the mic off so that he can shout at Kaner without it being recorded for posterity. 

“Get it together,” he says at the end of it, finger in Kaner’s face. 

Kaner knocks his hand aside and skates off and it takes every last ounce of willpower Johnny possesses not to tackle him to the ice and just punch that sneer off of Kaner’s face. Seabs slides to a stop beside him, a silent unquestioning presence at his shoulder. It brings Johnny back to himself. He can’t punch Kaner. He can’t be yelling at him. He certainly can’t be pulling his fucking mic off just because Kaner’s being a tool. Johnny’s been captaining this team before he could have a legal drink in Chicago, he’s navigated a lot of shit, all of it with Kaner at his shoulder. He should really know better by now. 

They have never gotten along, but these last few months have seen battle after battle in an endless unwinnable war and he doesn’t know what happened to make everything worse—they were functioning on some hatred equilibrium, and now, everything is out of balance. He certainly doesn’t know how to explain the fact that he wants to come all over Kaner’s face, watch it slide over that full red lower lip after he’s bitten it swollen. 

“I’m good,” he says to Seabs, nodding at him. 

Seabs breathes out through his nose in a rush, but he allows Johnny to skate off for the dressing room without comment. 

*

Kaner’s already lounging against his door when he makes it back to his apartment. 

Johnny swallows, dick starting to fill at the sight of Kaner’s forcefully relaxed pose and vengeance in his eyes. His body has turned completely traitor on him. 

Kaner doesn’t move away from the door, so Johnny has to reach past him to unlock it, trying to angle his body away to keep space between them. Of course, Kaner doesn’t let him, straightening up to his full height, but still not touching Johnny at all, just hanging out in his space, his breath on Johnny’s neck. It takes Johnny longer than it should to get the key into the lock. 

The door swings open behind Kaner’s shoulders, but he doesn’t move and finally Johnny gives him a delicate push, palm flat on his chest, to direct him through. Kaner goes easily enough, but as soon as the door closes behind Johnny, he’s on him, practically tackling him into a wall. 

Johnny yelps when his shoulder blade hits a picture frame. It’s a good picture, he thinks obscurely, of him and his brother at Moraine Lake, even if it’s now trying to take a chunk out of his back. Patrick grins ferociously at him, like this one sign of weakness, has made up for all of the malcontent on the ice. 

“What are we doing?” Johnny asks weakly. 

Patrick doesn’t answer him, he leans up, moving in for Johnny’s mouth, but at the last second, he veers to the side, pressing a wet openmouthed kiss to his throat, the point of his tongue drawing a line from Johnny’s jugular to the hollow between his collarbones. 

Johnny breathes out, harsh and stuttery, and Patrick brings a hand up to his shoulder, thumb dipping into the place his tongue marked. He kisses Johnny like that, up and down his neck, smoothly threading a knee between Johnny’s thighs to press their hips together. 

The picture frame is still a sharp point of discomfort at his back, but he hasn’t moved. He will, he thinks, in a moment. Finally Kaner brings his mouth to Johnny’s. He has to roll up on the balls of his feet to do it, thigh pressing more firmly into Johnny’s hard-on as a consequence. Johnny loves Patrick’s mouth. The realization is sharp and sudden. He could spend hours pressed up against this wall with him, kissing him lazily, letting Patrick draw his head aside to lightly scrape his teeth over Johnny’s jaw. 

“No hickies,” Johnny whispers. 

Patrick makes a rude noise, nipping at Johnny’s ear in way that makes him hiss and duck away, accidentally pressing himself further into the picture frame. “Hickies are for amateurs,” Patrick says, backing up. 

He pulls his shirt up over his head, knocking his baseball cap off in the process, hair sticking up in a million directions. Johnny stares at him, unable to think past the challenging jut of Patrick’s chin and the raw tender wetness of his mouth. Johnny uses a straight razor, unlike Kaner, who gave him such fierce beard burn the two times they did this, he was reminded every time something touched his face. He shudders helplessly under Patrick’s aggressive gaze. 

Patrick shakes his head slowly, clearly pleased with himself and the way Johnny is slumped against the wall, partially speared on a picture frame. 

“Do I need to tell you what happens next?” he asks. “Draw you a fucking map?” 

Johnny closes his eyes and weighs the possibility of telling Kaner to just get out. He already knows he won’t. That he can’t even. It’s the single-most discouraging thought he’s ever had, as he helplessly follows Kaner back to his bedroom, stripping off pieces of clothing as he goes. 

Kaner lays him out on the bed with a sharp shove and peels his boxer briefs off with more care than he had used that first time on the road. He draws two fingers over the thin skin just above Johnny’s dick, like he’s searching for that healed-over scab. Johnny squeezes his eyes shut tight. 

He’s surprised when Kaner takes his dick in his mouth. It seems like an admission of something—what, Johnny doesn’t know. He didn’t start this after all, he can’t be blamed if he doesn’t know the rules. But if he’s expecting the balance to shift in his favor now that Kaner’s sucking him off, he can forget about it. The nearly punishing way Kaner sucks him off, mouth hollowing tight around his cock every time he dips his head, proves just how much he’s running this show. 

Johnny can’t watch. He’s too keyed up and he’ll blow too soon. When Kaner wraps a hand around his dick, swirling his tongue around the head, Johnny has to draw his lip between his teeth to keep from crying out like a little bitch.

Kaner laughs, almost bordering on cruel, when Johnny comes, pulling off so that Johnny pulses hot and wet over his own stomach and the tops of his thighs. He doesn’t give Johnny space to breathe, moving up his body to straddle his jizz-sticky hips and taking his own fat cock in the same fist he used to draw Johnny off. Johnny eyes the head of it disappearing in Patrick’s white-knuckled grip, still come-dumb and breathing in irregular gasps, imagines taking it into his mouth. It would stretch the limits of his lips, he’s pretty sure.

“Look at me,” Patrick demands and Johnny does, but defiant to the last, he’s slow about it, dragging his gaze up from Patrick’s hips to the muscles tightening and releasing in his abdomen as he jerks himself off to the delicate pink of his nipples, before finally resting at his narrowed blue eyes. Patrick’s flushed, almost like he gets when he’s drunk, and his thighs tighten around Johnny’s hips. 

Johnny isn’t sure he’s allowed to touch him, he’s not entirely certain why he cares. It’s never stopped Patrick from thrusting into Johnny’s space where he hasn’t been invited. Patrick’s gaze seems to focus inward, almost as if Johnny’s not actually there, and it brings him back to that moment on the ice, where he wanted to hurt Patrick so intensely for that single solitary instant. 

He brings two fingers to his mouth, sucking them in, getting them good and wet. Patrick watches the motion disinterestedly, but when Johnny brings his hand to his ass, saliva-slickened fingers just rubbing at his hole, he cries out like he’s been punched. Johnny pushes one inside, his thick index finger, watching as the muscles in Patrick’s throat tighten and his veins stand out in harsh relief. 

He slumps forward, like his head is too heavy to hold up, bracing himself with a palm next to Johnny’s head on the pillow. Johnny turns his cheek, bringing his mouth to the vulnerable skin of Patrick’s wrist and brushing his lips against the blue veins where they show through. 

“Ohhhh,” Patrick says, arm trembling and Johnny parts his lips against Kaner’s wrist, dragging his tongue over his pulse. 

His finger is still hooked inside Kaner and Johnny tugs gently, reminding him that it’s still there, before pushing back in and searching—nobody has ever done this to him, he probably wouldn’t have let them if they asked, but he knows he hits Patrick’s prostate from the way Patrick bears down on him, air hissing out between his teeth. 

This time, he’s the one who demands, “Look at me,” forcing Patrick to meet his eyes before he bluntly presses at that spot inside Patrick again. 

Patrick comes like that, eyelids fluttering, Johnny’s name an unexpected sigh on his lips. Not Tazer or Johnny. Just a softly whispered ‘Jon’ that has no place in the space they’ve created between them. 

Patrick rolls off of him, hissing as Johnny’s finger leaves his body. Johnny would guess he’s never had more than the single slim digit of a girl’s hand up there. Johnny doesn’t understand why that automatically makes him imagine fingering Patrick open, getting him ready to take his dick. He blows out a breath and climbs out of the bed, knees and ankles popping as he gets to his feet. 

He washes his hands carefully in the en suite, and by the time he gets back, Patrick has passed out, facedown in the bed. Johnny stares at him, star-fished out over his sheets, the smooth planes of his back and the sharply cut layers of muscles at his shoulders and thighs. Johnny wants to lie down on top of him, cover Patrick’s body with his own, to count the vertebrae in his spine with his mouth. It’s this startling thought that forces him from the room. 

Patrick wakes him up at 3 in the morning, stumbling around in the darkened apartment pulling his clothes back on. He sees Johnny curled up on the couch, snorts, and sits down on the love seat to tug his limited edition Supra’s on his feet. Once he’s got them laced up, he gives Johnny a mocking salute and makes for the door without a backwards glance. 

Johnny feels like he should feel better now that Patrick’s left and it’s just him in his own space now, but it doesn’t feel better. He contemplates going back to his bedroom, now that Patrick’s not in his bed, but he doesn’t move. 

* 

When Johnny takes a hard hit on the ice, he’s the most glad for Patrick on the bench. He doesn’t ask if Johnny’s all right or if he needs to stop playing. He doesn’t even look at him with concern. It’s fucked up, but when he’s hurting, people watching and paying attention just makes him that much more uncomfortable. That much more aware that it shouldn’t have happened. 

On the day he separates his sholder, a wicked Type IV that also comes with a sternoclavicular dislocation that pretty much kills all the motion in his left arm, not even Patrick keeps the fear off of his face as they tow Johnny off the ice, barely able to keep his feet under him. Johnny realizes belatedly it’s because he’s crying, silently stoic to the last, but unable to keep his eyes from watering at the pain, fat unconscious tears he doesn’t even notice until his nose starts running. 

They’re trying to put a brave face on it, but Johnny knows even before the x-rays come back that he’s out for the rest of the season. He barely even hears the words “surgery” or “muscle transfer.” His consciousness of his shoulder is a horrible crawling morass of pain and he can only see through it when the doctor tells him, “this is going to set you back some, but you should get almost full use of your shoulder back.” 

Johnny swallows and doesn’t remember the trip that takes him back from Northwestern Memorial to his apartment. He sleeps for two days, a haze of icing and painkillers and depressed hopes, before anybody shows up to visit him. He appreciates the space—he’s not entirely certain he could bear to make nice with people right now and being a raging asshole to the friends and teammates who show up to comfort you is generally frowned upon. 

It genuinely surprises him when Patrick comes along with Seabs, Keith, and Sharpy who bring about forty pounds of takeout, a case of Heineken, and a good thirty-year bottle of Laphroaig that must’ve set somebody back a pretty penny. Patrick has never come to see him when he was injured before—and the last time Johnny’d been in this position, with his concussion, Patrick hadn’t spoken a single word to him for a month, not even to answer a direct question. 

“I can’t drink it,” Johnny explains as he places the bottle in the cabinet in the dry bar, although he’s taking less of the Vicodin than the doctors recommended. He doesn’t like the way the opiates turn his brain into a fuzzy blur of thoughts and emotions he can’t hold on to. “Thank you though.” 

Sharpy diffidently offers to sign his sling. 

“Fuck off,” Johnny tells him, smiling for the first time in two whole days. He doesn’t like the way the motion feels foreign on his face. 

They eat the pizza with him, although they shouldn’t. Johnny doesn’t say anything, but they must read it on his face. 

“Whatever, we’ll insist you wouldn’t eat anything unless we also had some,” Sharpy says, settling on Johnny’s couch and putting his feet straight on the coffee table even though he knows it drives Johnny insane. He probably does it to remind Johnny that nothing has changed. Not even that Keith can be relied upon to kick Sharpy’s stupid legs off again. Sharpy’s thwarted yelp is gratifying. 

Nothing _has_ changed. 

Johnny will be back for the 2014-15 season. He’s got surgery in six weeks, after that another four weeks to heal, and finally, roughly three months of physio to retrain his shoulder muscles. It’s a shitty timeline, but it’s one that Johnny can live with. 

“Hey,” Sharpy says, when Duncs and Seabs are in the kitchen fighting over dish duty and Kaner is awkwardly milling about staring at the pictures on his wall. “Don’t beat yourself up, okay?” 

Johnny looks up from his half-eaten slice of deep-dish pizza and blinks. “What?” 

“I know what’s going through your head—that you’re the Band-Aid on the team.” 

“I wasn’t thinking that,” Johnny tells him, but he won’t meet Sharpy’s eyes. He _has_ sustained a lot of injuries over the last few years—nothing that’s taken him out for this long, nothing that has the real risk of permanent damage—but he hates every moment of being kept off the ice, every moment of feeling like a lia-fucking-bility, when they could have another player who wasn’t made of glass, one his shoulder joint isn’t facing the real threat of continued degeneration. 

When he looks up, he finds Patrick staring at him from across the room, his arms crossed and his mouth a thin line. Sharpy sighs and shrugs. 

Eventually, Seabs rounds them all up to go when he notices that it’s mostly them talking and Johnny listening, holding his left arm stiffly and gingerly in its sling. It’s the right moment, because Johnny’s beginning to eye the hated Vicodin bottle, and he honestly just wants to crash on his bed and imagine he’s somewhere else, anywhere but here. 

“I’m gonna stay,” Patrick says to them all when they all get up to go and he stays seated on Johnny’s couch. 

Duncs and Seabs share a glance and Sharpy looks like he’s going to say something, but eventually they all just shrug. 

“See you tomorrow, Peeks, and you,” Sharpy says, pointing at Johnny. “Be good. Don’t try to take things too fast. I will know.” 

Johnny laughs and rolls his eyes. “Yeah? How will you know?” 

“Oh, I’ll know, don’t you worry about how,” Sharpy reiterates. Seabs snorts and shoves Sharpy towards the door.

“You’re such a creep,” Seabs says, sounding so beleaguered they all laugh, including Sharpy. 

“I _will_ know!” Sharpy replies, as if that’s the issue in question. 

Even with the door closed behind them, Johnny and Patrick listen to them arguing the whole way down the hall to the elevator bank. 

As soon as the last sound of bickering disappears, Patrick rounds on him. “You’re not taking the painkillers.” 

Johnny sighs and drops his head to the back of his chair. “They make me feel sick—besides, I’m fine. It’s not as bad as it sounds.” 

Patrick stares at him, mouth open, before he blinks and says, “Johnny, it is as bad as it sounds.”

Johnny shrugs and picks at a loose thread on the stitching of the sling. “I should get the full range of motion back, and if I don’t…it’s not like you need to lift your arm above your head for hockey.” 

Johnny’s just glad it’s his left arm and that he shoots left. If it was his right, with all the attendant power and finesse lost the minute the ligaments snapped like pieces of lego coming apart, he couldn’t stand it. He’d have to relearn all of his stick work, all of his control. The horror of it fills him with cold nausea. 

Some of this must show on his face, because Patrick gets up from the couch, crosses the space between them and gently settles himself on Johnny’s lap, careful to avoid the entire left half of Johnny’s torso. 

“What?” Johnny asks, frozen, unsure what the hell is happening to him. 

“Shut up,” Patrick tells him and kisses him, hands framing his face, and for once, off the ice, he knows exactly what Patrick is thinking. It’s written right there on his face—that Johnny is allowed to be afraid and upset. 

“Kaner,” Johnny says weakly, resting his forehead on Patrick’s shoulder. He doesn’t know what to make of empathy, let alone the kind that comes from Patrick Kane. He doesn’t know why the thought of it hurts as much as it comforts. “You have to tell me what you want from me.” 

“Jesus,” Patrick says and now he looks angry and desperately sad. “You fucking steamrollered me in World Juniors, you know that? And I keep waiting to get better, to get over you, but it never happens.” 

“I don’t believe you,” Johnny says, eyes prickling. He can’t help it and he will go to his grave blaming it on the half of a Vicodin pill he took over eight hours ago.

“You think I give a fuck what you believe?” Kaner tells him viciously, the same vitriol in his voice that Johnny knows so well, but the lips he presses to Johnny’s are soft in contrast. They’re sipping kisses, as his mom would say when his dad caught her in the hall just after coming home from work or sometimes at the dinner table just because. He and David would make faces and shout, “Gross! Kissing!” at the top of their lungs. Johnny realizes he’s never had one until this moment; that he’d never even thought of being on the receiving end of such a thing. He tightens his good arm around Patrick’s middle, because all he knows how to do is hang on. 

*

For the next month, Kaner is on the road more often than he’s not and Johnny does his best to take it easy. It’s better than having a concussion, which severely limited almost every single type of enjoyable activity aside from sleeping and even that became impossible after a while, simply because his body started refusing to do any more of it.

Kaner texts him all the time. All. The. Time. 

Johnny’s never been overly enamored of the activity and now he’s got a million messages filled with song lyrics, and pictures of cute kids asking Kaner to sign Tazer’s jersey, and how tired he is of pasta, and how lame Sharpy’s latest prank is, and dirty talk about the way Johnny looks in his boxer-briefs and how much easier it is to not spring wood in the locker room now that Johnny isn’t there. 

Johnny does his best to answer the deluge, although he thinks the only times it’s actually important are the times Patrick goes silent on him—the times after they’ve taken a hard loss and the press keeps asking how much of a team are the Blackhawks without Jonathan Toews. 

“Don’t you fucking prove them right,” Johnny texts him after watching Patrick get blindsided by the question for the second time in a post-game interview. Patrick doesn’t speak to him for three straight days, but they win two shutout games in a row with Patrick lighting the UC up so hard nobody would dare to question his worth. 

Just like old times. 

The night before Johnny’s surgery, Patrick’s at his place even though it’s late and he should probably be resting at home. The first game of the playoffs is in two days and Johnny can tell that Patrick hasn’t been sleeping well. Johnny’s also afraid and he knows it’s making him act like a total jackoff, but he doesn’t know how to stop. 

“Jesus Christ, will you quit it?” Patrick shouts after Johnny snaps at him in response to a perfectly innocuous question. 

Johnny goes instantly hard, because nothing gets to him as easily as Patrick giving as good as he gets. They blink at each other for one long fraught moment, and then they’re both scrambling for Johnny’s bedroom, stripping off clothing as quickly and economically as possible. 

They have to be gentle now. No more slamming up against walls or other surfaces. There’s a visible protrusion in Johnny’s shoulder to remind them why it isn’t possible. 

“You should fuck me,” Kaner says from underneath him, breaking away from what started out as harsh meeting of mouths and morphed into something far more measured and slow. “I think…I think I would like it.” 

They’re kind of a mess. Johnny hasn’t done this before, although Kaner has, with chicks. 

“I was clearly not dating the right people,” Johnny says acidly when Kaner mocks him for it at the same time that Johnny is fingering him open with the slippery water-based lube he favors coating his fingers. 

“Fucking right you weren’t,” Kaner says, grinning bright, making it perfectly clear how he feels about Johnny with anybody but himself. 

Johnny rolls his eyes.

Ass-play is definitely Kaner’s speed, he’s hard and flushed and even as he ridicules Johnny’s technique, general demeanor, and the size and shape of his fingers, he can’t stop flexing back into Johnny’s hand. 

“You fucking love my hands,” Johnny says against his throat, trying so hard to remember what it is he’s supposed to be doing and where he is past the pressure in his own balls. By the time, Kaner finally tells him to get on with it Johnny’s desperately starting to wonder if he’ll come just like this, only imagining what it’s like inside Kaner. 

Kaner rolls over and gets his knees under him and Johnny has to pause just to breathe for one long moment, staring at the glistening red rim of his hole, his thumb holding him open to help guide him inside. 

Patrick comes with a muttered oath as soon as Johnny bottoms out inside him, shuddering and clenching around Johnny in a way that makes his eyes cross stupidly. He’s glad Patrick can’t see it, because he’s not entirely certain he could take the derision that would surely follow. The heat of Patrick around him, the strong proud arch of his spine topped by thick shoulders, and the perfect smooth expanse of his pale skin—it’s both too much and not enough. He breathes in harsh rasps that never seem to bring enough air into his lungs. He's blindsided that Patrick came, just from that, without even a reach-around. 

Patrick may have already come, but he holds himself firm against Johnny’s thrusts, telling him to go harder and faster, the backs of his thighs flexing powerfully as he works to stay in place, to prove that Johnny can’t shift him. Johnny can’t go as hard or as deep as Patrick wants, not with his shoulder the way it is, he pinches Patrick’s side to remind him.

“You’ll take it any way I want to give it,” he says, not entirely certain where the words come from. 

Patrick twitches underneath him, hands tightening on Johnny’s sheets. He cranes his head around for one moment to tell him, “That’s what you think,” before another harsh thrust makes him gasp and drop his head. 

Johnny comes, watching his dick disappear into Patrick’s ass in a daze, good arm collapsing under his weight so that Patrick has to hold them both up. 

After giving him a scant few seconds to adjust to one of the hardest orgasms in his life, Patrick rolls him off, careful of Johnny’s shoulders even as he brusquely separates them. The move is so uniquely Kaner, Johnny has to smile.

Johnny carefully strips the condom off, tying it off and tossing it in the wastebasket. He hopes it makes it in. He’s going to regret it in the morning if he steps on it, but he also realizes he doesn’t care enough to move. 

Shifting around on the bed, trying to arrange his arm so that it won’t hurt him, just brings all the fears back again. 

He's so alone in his head, that he startles when Patrick leans over him, resting his chin on the forearm he lays across Johnny’s sternum. 

“It’s gonna be fine,” he says, face placid. 

Johnny closes his eyes, because he’s too afraid to hope. But then, he reminds himself, he was too afraid to let himself feel the way he felt, to really peer inside himself and take a look.

“Sometimes, I think I need you to be brave for me,” he says, eyes still shut against Patrick’s face. 

Patrick laughs, soft and wondering, smiling at Johnny in fond exasperation when he finally opens his eyes. “I have always known that.”

**Author's Note:**

> ETA: Patrick's point of view available [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3491390/chapters/12117752)
> 
> As Countess Von Boobs and I were driving around today, I said to her, “It was probably Landeskog who threw the hit that nearly tore Johnny’s arm from his body. And you know a few games later Kaner probably tried to fight him, like a dumbass, and because Landeskog felt kind of bad about it, he let Kaner have the first punch. And of course, Duchene’s later like, ‘what the hell was that nonsense, man?’ and Landeskog’s like, ‘I felt like I owed him one.’ And Duchene’s all, ‘but why?’” 
> 
> And she chimed in with, “Landeskog says, ‘because it made him feel better.’” 
> 
> “See? Landeskog, captaining even more than the Avs,” I said, in-between laughing uproariously (we're hilarious okay). “Why the fuck isn’t there Landeskog/Duchene porn?” 
> 
> And then, because the Countess is my soulmate, she says, “Write it.”


End file.
